Google Survey Adds Free Website Satisfaction Survey

Yesterday on Plus Google Survey announced a new (and free) survey tool to assess visitor satisfaction with your website. From their post:

If you are like most business owners, you know how important a healthy online community is to your business’s success. Traditionally, collecting user feedback has been an expensive and time-consuming process, but now you can hear from your site visitors for free using Google Consumer Surveys.

Website satisfaction surveys allow you to easily create customer satisfaction surveys in order to stay in tune with what your customers think. All you have to do is paste a small snippet of code in the HTML for your website. This will load a discreet satisfaction survey in the lower right hand corner of your website so you can get immediate feedback from your users.

Users will be asked to complete a four-question satisfaction survey. Surveys will run until they have received 500 responses and will start again after 30 days so you can track responses over time. This is currently limited to US English visitors on non-mobile devices.

The default questions are free and you can customize questions for just $0.01 per response or $5.00 for 500 responses. By using Google Consumer Surveys to measure website satisfaction you automatically get aggregated and analyzed responses, provided to you through a simple online interface.

Creating a website satisfaction survey is simple, just go to< a href=”http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/publishers” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/publishers to get started.

The process of starting a survey is dead simple. You simply follow these 4 steps:

The default, free survey will run 500 times each month and ask four standardized questions:

Overall, how satisfied are you with this website?

What, if anything, do you find frustrating or unappealing about this website?

What is your main reason for visiting this website today?

Did you successfully complete your main reason for visiting this website today?

For as little as .01 a question you can create custom questions and target different demographics. From the help files:

After 30 days, the survey starts again so you can track responses over time. This is currently limited to US English visitors on non mobile devices and non Safari browsers.

Google Consumer Surveys for website satisfaction are free by default. You can create additional surveys with customized questions for 1¢ per response or $5.00 for 500 responses.

I just finished implementing the survey setup at LocalU.org on a WordPress site. It took me all of 3 minutes. Please stop over and take it so we can 1)see what the real reports look like and 2)continue to improve our site.

Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.

This is a cool feature, but on Local U, I found that it was a bit problematic when I started the survey and then navigated to a different page in the middle of the process. For example, the second question asked something about what I didn’t like about the website. I had to browse the site more to determine that, so it restarted on the next page. That wasn’t a huge deal as it’s only 4 questions, but it was a little annoying.

I’m also curious how Google will use this information. If they’re focused on user experience, this would theoretically be a good way to gauge this, but in reality, it seems silly that this would influence your search results. I imagine this would be fairly open to fraud.

Thanks for the info Mike. I hadn’t heard about this. This seems like a great way for Google to get insight into the quality of a site and I’d be surprised if at some point this doesn’t affect search results in some way.

@Pete I agree that if proven to affect SERPs there will be a lot of attempted fraud, but I’m sure the omnipotent Google can figure out a way to filter out fraudulent results through simple analytics (ie only allowing results from unique IP addresses, etc.). Also, with a cap at 500 surveys a month (and assuming Google will filter out the fraud), spamming your own survey will only shoot yourself in the foot and block you from recieving genuine results that may have a beneficial effect on your SERP ranking.